“So, Doloriel.” Eligor put down his cup and sat up straight in his conference chair, as if the flames and poison and murder had just been the preliminary handshakes and bows, and now the business meeting could begin. “Tell me where the feather is now.”

It felt like it took me about an hour to find the strength to talk. “I . . . told . . . you. I told you everything.”

“No, as a matter of fact, you didn’t. You told me it was in your jacket pocket, hidden by some angel trickery, with your body in a house in San Judas. My people went over every inch of the place. Your body isn’t there.”

Even out where I was, on the far side of a million years of torment, this scared me, not because I cared about my Earth body at this point, or even G-Man and his girlfriend Posie, who were living in the house, but because all I wanted to do now was die the real and final death, and I knew Eligor wouldn’t kill me until he had the feather back. “It’s . . . gone?”

“In fact, now that I think of it, the whole thing’s a bit convenient. You had the feather all along and didn’t know it? And it was your buddy Sammariel who caught Grasswax trying to plant it on you? Cute, since your friend’s hiding out in that discount version of Heaven the Third Way dreamers created. And to make it even more suspicious, we both know who Sammariel takes his orders from.”

I was having trouble keeping up and not just because of the pain. Eligor was wrong, I hadn’t tried to hold anything back. If the feather was gone, if my body had disappeared, I was just as surprised as anyone. “Sam takes orders from . . . ? You mean Kephas?”

“Yes, ‘Kephas,’ or whatever name you want to use. The architect of this whole fiasco.”

The mysterious higher angel had recruited Sam to the Third Way, and had given him the tools to make it happen, including the thing Sam called “the God Glove,” which he had used to hide Eligor’s marker for his deal with Kephas, namely Kephas’ own angelic wing-feather. Hid it on me, as it turned out, although I hadn’t known it at the time. It was what got me onto Eligor’s radar in the first place. I really wished I had never seen or heard of the thing.

Bam! Eligor hit the table and made his cup jump, sloshing coffee across the imitation wood grain Formica just as if it were real coffee in a real room in a real place. “I want it. And you’re going to fetch it back for me.”

“Yeah, right. If it’s gone, I don’t know where it is, either. Get thee behind me, Shit Hat.”